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?Big? History and Individual Life Story

20.02.2008, 20:14

R.S. Cherepanova

?Big? History and Individual Life Story.
Provincial Intelligentsia in a Mirror of Large Autobiographic Interviews

(Abstract)

This project has begun more than year ago when I have received at my disposal six oral detailed biographic interviews. In these stories former college?s teachers (2 men - B., Ch., and 4 women ? A., E., K., L.) told about their life and how they had gone through wars and other great events of 20th century. People could speak all that they want and could compose own life?s mosaic easily and ?correctly?.

It was interesting to me to analyze this material as a historical source. Respondents were united by the ?locus?, by their accessory to one generation, by their professional and ?intelligentional? identity. At the same time, they were natives from different regions, from different national and social subcultures. I thought it can be potentially fruitful to compare this similarities and distinctions.
Really, the information which belongs to social history level laid on a surface and was easily skimmed.

Speaking about constantly ?hard times? (civil war, collectivization, Second World War, postwar ruin and reconstruction, and so on), respondents depicted some traditional practice of survival, which in relation to authority can be described as strategies of ?leaving? (the person relied only on own forces, endurance, skill to adapt and to save), strategies of ?evasion? (different ways to evade the rules, established by authority) and strategies of ?junction? (occurrence in a circle of the people connected with authority ? is known, such occurrence could ensure some privileges or more favorable work).

Stories fixed the channels of social mobility in the post-war Soviet society (on quantity of mentions there were education and individual abilities, personal protections, the loyal attitude to authority). Respondents defined their aspiration to pull themselves from material trouble as the stimulus to promotion upward, emphasized the low social value of working labor, and proclaimed the personal growth and self-realization as the main precondition of happiness. As for national self-perception, the story-tellers having a German (B.) or Jewish (A.) origin preferred to not accent these circumstances and in general tried to bypass a national theme. K., the oldest from all story-tellers and having (among all interlocutors) the lowest educational level and the lowest social status, on the contrary, actively ranged nationalities on various human qualities under her life experience. A lot of internal contradictions were peculiar to all stories. For example, respondent could proclaim the absence of repressions in own close circle and after that could tell about his uncle who was subjected to repression (E.). Another story-teller (B.) proclaimed the absence of extreme difficulties for civilian population during the Great Patriotic War, and right now narrated about children who had died of starvation or accidentally were undermined on a hand grenade. (Evidently, in the points of such contradictions the field of personal recollections is covered with the sphere of collective memory.) Images of War, Authority, or Happiness were looked quite relative and mythical in these ?real life stories?.

In spite of fact that all interlocutors have gone through war in the different roles (collective-farmers, schoolchildren, working youth, soldiers, soldier family?s members), all of them described the war in discourse of deep disaster, as some metaphysical catastrophe, state of darkness, chaos and total collapse. Under this scenario (according to a script) respondents described the picture of absolutely archaic social relations. The State (Authority) in the stories is appeared as one-sided, appropriating and pressing force, using its resource exceptionally for guaranteeing own needs and, by means of its representatives, raping people (including all senses). The respondents? position to authority were equally passive regardless of their general positive (K.) or negative (B., Ch.) attitude to Soviet system. In the face of State as archaic Force person felt himself savagely defenseless. Initial elements of God and Evil, Life and Death frequently were personified in the stories. Thus trial that commanding officer put on to ordinary soldier (E.? father) is looked as absolutely mythological (?Sybille? riddle?). The soldier passed test successfully and the officer became his protector during whole war. Story-teller Ch. generally inclined to interpret war as great trial. That?s why only his story described the moments of positive and concerning (towards the citizens) State activity.

Summarizing, the respondents? perception of war or post-war Soviet history fairly depended on their self-perception. The so-called ?big? history from their recollections was rather a background for personal life history, for ?lucky? or ?unlucky?, for hero or sacrifice self-conception. Story-tellers with ?winner? self-conception (Ch., E., K.) saw much more positive in the war? and post-war? situation, demonstrated more approving pronouncements about power than tellers A., B., L., who posed themselves in different gradations of misfortune, unrecognizing, suffering. Almost on the level of intonation the stories of ?unlucky? were filled of soft, hesitating, complaining notes whereas monologues of ?fighters?, ?players?, ?winners? sounded more assured and aggressive. As a result, it will be imprudent to believe in respondent? information about ?big? history without taking its personal self-reflection into consideration.
Having begun with six initial stories I have solved to collect information purposefully. This project, supported by the Russian Fund of Fundamental Investigation, gets rather a passionate name: ?The XX century in appraisals and recollections of the provincial intelligentsia?.

Thirty detailed autobiographic stories have been already recorded: twenty women and ten men have been interviewed. All respondents are representatives of provincial (Chelyabinsk region) ?intelligentional? (people of the mental work) circle and those who once dropped of the provinces leaving climbed the career ladder. To interview all these different people I had to work out some universal inquirer, taking into consideration unwillingness to offer sincerely and spontaneity up. In the upshot I resolved to use the inquirer just as a ?prop? for our conversations. Some of the stories appeared to be rather shot, others inquired several meetings.
All the conversations were based on voluntary lines and on the principle of anonymity. The respondents could refuse to respond to any question asked, without giving any reason. An important principle of work with the recorded texts was to reconstruct everything that had paned over in silence that is the things which the respondents thoroughly avoided to mention. In most of the stories such topics as unfortunate love, resentment against parents (for any of several reasons), and the sexual revolution of the 1960-70-s appeared to be ?forbidden? ones. In the interviews were only 3 women I was lucky to notice a real admission of the fact that the revolution of morals had occurred (in all cases the women were telling somebody else?s stories, as they themselves were ?not that young? to adopt and reproduce new cultural models; in other words, speaking about somebody else they felt free).

In stereotype expectation that men will start speaking more readily about the ?big? history than about the history of ?individual life? was justified not to the desired extent. The presence of the ?big? history in the stories was determined by the educational and intellectual levels of the respondents, by the distance they were keeping while talking to the interviewer and by some ?painful? moments in their recollections as well. So, Yu., a well known dissident from Chelyabinsk, who had to serve a sentence in a camp for the foundation of the youth organization, was constantly turning the conversation back to his childhood, the ?painful? moments of which (his father?s arrest, unrequited love for his mother, which consequently grew into resentment, frivolous relationship with the girl from the neighborhood) he failed to get over. His story is absolutely lacking the ?other? history, only ?inner? one is presentand wearing out self-analyses as well. He?s recollecting only those people and events of the ?big? history that became a part of his inner world (camps of the Stalin era, the Leningrad Bohemia, Chelyabinsk students of the 1950s, V. Krivulin, L. Gumilev, G. Starovoitova, M. Plisetskaya) and is depicting then with a peculiar personal attitude. Starovoitova was a bosom friend of his, who once offered him a pro forma marriage to settle in Leningrad, Plisetskaya was for him a girl with long legs, whom he considered to be his bride. His being morbidly different from other children, all the promises be showed as a poet and translator, his arrest, serving the sentence so much contrasted with his current colorless and unsettled life (several marriages, constant ?wars? with all his mothers-in-law, constant alternations of places of job and domicile, hapless literary career) that he didn?t manage to leave the 1980s having remained in those times when he was aware of his own concernment. Obviously, the dominant theme in his storied was his being dissident.

As far as all the possible angles for the analysis of the information is concerned, it?s significant to mention the level of ?simple? human history. In the stories collected there are such episodes as admission to party (E., M.4), enlistment in the State Security Committee (KGB) as an intelligencer (K.2), the scenes of life on the occupied by the fascists territory, behind the scenes struggle of provincial actors, information about youth of the actors and political figures, who are famous now, comments on academician Tikhomirov and Nechkina personalities and a lot of other facts valuable for a historian dealing with everyday history.
The stories about how different the living standards were in former serf and state villages in the 1930s (M1) were rather impressive; or the stories about people living in Magnitogorsk during Second World War and being so well supplied with food that they could throw away the flounder, they got with the food card, only because it was the ?goddamned? fish; or the fact that in the 1950-1960s all the registry offices practiced the lists of married couples who decided to get divorced in the newspapers. It was done in order to bring moral pressure on spouses (probably, the government considered the social mind to be rather traditional, and it was justified, anyway according to K.2 and other respondents? stories).

So, one more important level of the information analysis is the reconstruction of the mentality and psychology of the soviet society strata, or at least of one of them ? of the intelligentsia. It?s incredibly interesting to observe the self presentation of the respondents (national and social routs, family traditions, motivations, behavior, etc.).

And, finally, the third analysis level is the level of social history. Telling about their life the respondents tried to depict the level of soviet provincial society in general, touching upon such issues as nationality problem (Jewish, Tatar, German, West-Ukrainians in Russia and Russian in the Baltic region), demography problem, social and regional inequality in USSR, waves and directions of migration, channels of mobility. Undoubtedly, we can trace great ?Petersburg? and ?Volga region? waves of the pre-war and post-war migration to the Ural region which affected the formation of the Ural intelligentsia. Almost all the women with actively developing and successful careers complained about the lack of help (sometimes about the lack of understanding their ambitions) from their husbands. There was only one respondent (N.) who mentioned a ?fair? division of household responsibilities with her husband, who is (it?s worth mentioning) one of the representatives of the artistic intelligentsia (most women- narrators were married to laborers).
Taking into consideration the account of attention paid to certain events of the ?big? history the hierarchy of the crucial events of the XX century, as the provincial intelligentsia see it, is the following: the Great Patriotic War (is recollected in rather a calm way), collectivization and the repression of the Stalin era (are talked about more emotionally, with the signs of resentment, sorrow, blame), the revolution and the Civil War (are mentioned passively, as fact that cannot be changed), the Khrushchev ?thaw? (all the emotions were obliterated by the latest rationalization), the rough 1990s (least frequency of being mentioned, tendency to forget, ?not to remember?).
So, these are my general preliminary observations and reflections about the project that is still being worked on.